Madonnas and Magdalenes, St. Catherines and St. Jeromes; but why these should predominate, why certain events and characters from the Old and the New Testament should be continually repeated, and others comparatively neglected; whence the predilection for certain legendary personages, who seemed to be multiplied to infinity, and the rarity of others; of this we know nothing.

We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the galleries and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes and characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without any clear idea of their meaning, derivation, or relative propriety. The palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr triumphant in death. We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener in Zeluco that we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his gridiron, and St. Catherine by her wheel. We are not at a loss to recognize the Magdalene's "loose hair and lifted eye," even when without her skull and her vase of ointment. We learn to know St. Francis by his brown habit and shaven crown and wasted ardent features: but how do we distinguish him from St. Anthony or St. Dominick? As for St. George and the Dragon - from the St. George of the Louvre, Raphael's, who sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of celestial aid, down to him "who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess's door," - he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon? "That is a copy after Raphael." And who is that majestic creature holding her palm branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet? "That is the famous Moretto at Vienna." Are we satisfied? not in the least! but we try to look wiser,

and pass on.

In the old times the painters of these legendary scenes and subjects could always reckon securely on certain associations and certain sympathies in the minds of the spectators. We have outgrown these associations, we repudiate these sympathies. We have taken these works from their consecrated localities, in which they once held each their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our drawing-rooms and our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our sideboards and now

what do they say to us? That Magdalene, weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner, - that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf, that poor tortured slave, to whose aid St. Mark comes sweeping down from above, can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines and correct drawing and gorgeous color? Must we

be told that one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the third a Tintoret, before we dare to melt in compassion or admiration?

or the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and influence, must it be with disdain or with pity? This, as it appears to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational as well as a most irreverent, view of the question; it is to confine the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of Art within very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thousand ennobling and inspiring thoughts. Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the study of Art. People look at the pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye more than mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture critics.

II. OF THE DISTINCTION TO BE DRAWN BETWEEN THE DEVOTIONAL AND THE HISTORICAL SUBJECTS

At first, when entering on a subject so boundless and so diversified, we are at a loss for some leading classification which shall be distinct and intelligible, without being mechanical. It appears to me that all sacred representations, in as far as they appeal to sentiment and imagination, resolve themselves into two great classes, which I shall call the DEVOTIONAL and the HISTORICAL.

Devotional pictures are those which portray the objects of our veneration with reference only to their sacred character, whether standing singly or in company with others. They place before us no action or event, real or supposed. They are neither portrait nor history. A group of sacred personages where no action is represented is called in Italian a sacra

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conversazione; the word conversazione, which signifies a society in which there is communion, being here, as it appears to me, used with peculiar propriety. All subjects, then, which exhibit to us sacred personages, alone or in groups, simply in the character of superior beings, must be considered as devotionally treated.

But a sacred subject, without losing wholly its religious import, becomes historical the moment it represents any story, incident, or action, real or imagined. All pictures which exhibit the events of Scripture story; all those which express the actions, miracles, and martyrdoms of saints, come under this class; and to this distinction I must call the attention of the reader, requesting that it may be borne in mind throughout this work.

We must also recollect that a story, action, or fact may be so represented as to become a symbol expressive of an abstract idea; and some Scriptural and some legendary subjects may be devotional, or historical, according to the sentiment conveyed for example, the Crucifixion and the Last Supper may be so represented as either to exhibit an event, or to express a symbol of our Redemption. The Raising of Lazarus exhibits in the Catacombs a mystical emblem of the general resurrection; in the grand picture by Sebastian del Piombo, in our National Gallery, it is a scene from the life of our Saviour. Among the legendary subjects, the Penance of the Magdalene and St. Martin Dividing his Cloak may be merely incidents, or they may be symbolical, the first of penitence, the latter of charity, in the general sense. And, again, there are some subjects which, though expressing a scene or an action, are wholly mystical and devotional in their import; as the Vision of St. Augustine and the Marriage of St. Catherine.

Among the grandest of the devotional subjects we may reckon those compositions which represent the whole celestial hierarchy; the divine personages of the Trinity, the angels and archangels, and the beatified spirits of the just. Such is the subject called the "Paradiso," so often met with in pictures and ecclesiastical decoration, where Christ is enthroned in glory; such is also the Coronation of the Virgin, that ancient and popular symbol of the triumph of Religion or the Church; the Adoration of the Lamb; and the Last Judg

ment, from the Apocalypse. The order of precedence in these sacred assemblages was early settled by ecclesiastical authority, and was almost as absolute as that of a modern code of honor. First after the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, as Regina Angelorum, and St. John the Baptist; then, in order, the Evangelists; the Patriarchs; the Prophets; the Apostles; the Fathers; the Bishops; the Martyrs; the Hermits; the Virgins; the Monks, Nuns, and Confessors.

As examples, I may cite the Paradiso of Angelico, in the Florence Academy; the Coronation of the Virgin by Hans Hemling, in the Wallerstein collection, which contains not less than fifty-two figures, all individualized with their proper attributes; and which, if it were possible, should be considered in contrast with the Coronation by Angelico. The Flemish painter seems to have carried his intense impression of earthly and individual life into the regions of heaven; the Italian, through a purer inspiration, seems to have brought all Paradise down before us upon earth. In the Adoration of the Lamb by [the brothers] Van Eyck [the Ghent altar-piece], there are not fewer than two hundred figures. For the Last Judgment, the grand compositions of Orcagna 1 in the Campo Santo [Pisa], of Luca Signorelli and Angelico at Orvieto, and the fresco of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel may be consulted.

Where the usual order is varied, there is generally some reason for it; for instance, in the exaltation of a favorite saint, as we sometimes find St. Dominick and St. Francis by the side of St. Peter and St. Paul; and among the miniatures of that extraordinary MS., the Hortus Deliciarum, now at Strasbourg, painted for a virgin abbess, there is a "Paradiso," in which the painter, either by her command or in compliment to her, has placed the virgins immediately after the angels.

The representation of the Virgin and Child with saints grouped around them is a devotional subject familiar to us from its constant recurrence. It also frequently happens that the tutelary saint of the locality, or the patron saint of the votary, is represented as seated on a raised throne in the centre;

1 [Orcagna on the authority of Vasari has long been called the author of these frescoes; but there are grounds for believing that they are the work of Nardo Daddi. Vide Layard's Revision of Kugler's Handbook, vol. i. p. 111.]

and other saints, though under every other circumstance taking a superior rank, become here accessaries, and are placed on each side or lower down in the picture: for example, where St. Augustine is enthroned, and St. Peter and St. Paul stand on each side, as in picture by B. Vivarini (Venice; SS. Giovanni e Paolo), or where St. Barbara is enthroned, and Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine stand on each side, as in a picture by Matteo di Siena (San Dominico, Siena).

In such pictures, the votary or donor is often introduced kneeling at the feet of his patron, either alone or accompanied by his wife and other members of his family and to express the excess of his humility, he is sometimes so diminutive in proportion to the colossal object of his veneration as to be almost lost to sight; we have frequent examples of this naïveté of sentiment in the old mosaics and votive altar-pieces; for instance, in a beautiful old fresco at Assisi, where the Magdalene, a majestic figure about six feet high, holds out her hand in benediction to a little Franciscan friar about a foot in height but it was abandoned as barbarous in the later schools of Art, and the votary, when retained, appears of the natural size; as in the Madonna del Donatore1 of Raphael (Vatican, Rome), where Sigismond Conti is almost the finest and most striking part of that inestimable picture; and in the Madonna of the Meyer family by Holbein (Dresden Gallery).

When a bishop is introduced into a group of saints kneeling, while all the others are standing, he may be supposed to be the Donatore or Divoto, the person who presents the picture. When he is standing, he is one of the bishop-patrons or bishop-martyrs, of whom there are some hundreds, and who are more difficult to discriminate than any other pictured saints.

And this leads me to the subject of the so-called anachronisms in devotional subjects, where personages who lived at different and distant periods of time are found grouped together. It is curious to find the critics of the last century treating with pity and ridicule, as the result of ignorance or a barbarous unformed taste, the noblest and most spiritual conceptions of poetic Art. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds had so little idea of the true object and feeling of such representations, that he 1 [Better known as the Madonna di Foligno.]